News from Europe:

Take a look at the Helsinki Complaints Choir. This is along the same lines as my 2003 dream that I was going to put on a Brown v. Board of Education oratorio. (See also the Civil Rights Cantata, a musical setting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Nuremberg Principles, and excerpts from the U.N. Charter, by James F. Wood. You can buy that here.)

Also, Slate comments on the release on probation of British Holocaust denier David Irving, who had served 13 months of a 3-year sentence in Austria. "Score one for free speech," says Michael Weiss of Slate. (Weiss adds "even if the speaker is thoroughly unsavory," which sadly seems obligatory these days.) Does anyone have any evidence that the probation was based on free-speech concerns? I didn't see any in the news article I read. (I know, perhaps any shortening of a speech-violative sentence is in some sense a victory for free speech. But it's arguably not such a big "ideas" victory if he was released to open up prison space for murderers, because he was judged unlikely to reoffend, because the Austrians thought deportation was a better option for foreign prisoners, etc.)